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Friday Dec 06, 2013

I'm late to making it available here, but O'Reilly media published the video recording of my presentation on The Language of Discovery: A Toolkit For Designing Big Data Interactions from last year's (2012) Strata conference in NY.
Looking back at this, I'm happy to say that while my thinking on several of the key ideas has advanced quite a bit in the past 12 months (see our more recent materials), the core ideas and concepts remain vital.
Those are, briefly:

Big Data is useless unless people can engage with it effectively

Discovery is a critical and inadequately acknowledged aspect of sense making that is core to realizing value from Big Data

Discovery is literally the most important human/machine interaction in the emerging Age of Insight

Tuesday Aug 20, 2013

Several weeks ago, I was invited to speak to an audience of IT and business leaders at Walmart about the Language of Discovery. Every presentation is a feedback opportunity as much as a chance to broadcast our latest thinking (musicians call it trying out new material), so I make a point to share evolving ideas and synthesize what we've learned since the last instance of public dialog.

For the audience at Walmart, as part of the broader framing for the Age of Insight, I took the opportunity to share findings from some of the recent research we've done on Data Science (that's right, we're studying data science). We've engaged consistently with data science practitioners for several years now (some of the field's leaders are alumni of Endeca), as part of our ongoing effort to understand the changing nature of analytical and sense making activities, the people undertaking them, and the contexts in which they take place. We've seen the discipline emerge from an esoteric specialty into full mainstream visibility for the business community. Interpreting what we've learned about data science through a structural and historic perspective lead me to draw a broad parallel between data science now and natural philosophy at its early stages of evolution.

We also shared some exciting new models for enterprise information engagement; crafting scenarios using language of discovery to describe discovery needs and activity at the level of discovery architecture, IT portfolio planning, and knowledge management (which correspond to UX, technology, and business perspectives) - demonstrating the versatility of the language as a source of linkage across separate disciplines.

We continue to identify new frontiers for the language of discovery - I'm looking forward to sharing some of this work soon.

Friday May 24, 2013

Last week, in a presentation titled "Big Data Is Not the Insight: The Language of Discovery" I had the opportunity to share our evolving perspective on discovery and its relationship to big data with the audience at the Enterprise Search Europe conference in London. Our point of view is rooted in our (ongoing) deep research into discovery needs and activities in both enterprise and consumer domains, and it is always exciting to share our latest understanding and insights.

We've published the slides and materials shared at the conference, and welcome dialog about everything we've shared; the big ideas and fundamental concepts, the detailed findings, the implications for people active in the discovery and business analytics space, our recommended best practices for creators of discovery tools and solutions, etc.

I've included the description of the presentation from the conference program to complement the slides.

Designing Effective Search and Discovery Experiences for the Enterprise, Using the Language of Discovery

The oncoming tidal wave of Big Data, with its rapidly evolving
ecosystem of multi-channel information saturated environments and
services, brings profound challenges and opportunities for the design of
effective user experiences that UX practitioners are just beginning to
engage with in a meaningful fashion. In this coming Age of Insight,
'discovery' is not only the purview of specialized Data Scientists who
create exotic visualizations of massive data sets, it is a fundamental
category of human activity that is essential to everyday interactions
between people, resources, and environments. Search is the gateway to
discovery, and thus is indispensable as a capability.
To provide architects and designers with an effective starting point
for creating satisfying search and discovery experiences this session
presents a simple analytical and generative vocabulary for understanding
how people conduct the broad range of discovery activities necessary in
the information-permeated enterprise, and defining the search
experiences they need.

Specifically, this session will present:

A simple, research-derived language for describing search and
discovery needs and activities that spans domains, environments, media,
and user types

Observed and reusable patterns of discovery activities in individual and collaborative settings

A practical model that defines actionable patterns of information engagement throughout the enterprise

Examples of the architecture of successful discovery experiences at small and large scales

A vocabulary and perspective for discovery as a critical individual and organizational capability

Guidance on using this vocabulary to drive large scale IT portfolio
management as well as the design of individual search solutions